Name: Editorial: Justice Hagedorn is the only actual conservative on the Wisconsin Supreme Court
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Editorial: Justice Hagedorn is the only actual conservative on the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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You have permission to edit this article.Politicians and pundits show their ignorance when they refer to the Wisconsin Supreme Court as having “a conservative majority.” What the court has is an even divide between three progressive jurists who respect their oaths to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state of Wisconsin, and three partisan judicial activists who can casually disregard the rule of law if it might benefit their Republican allies and corporate paymasters.The only actual conservative on the court is Justice Brian Hagedorn, who made national headlines last week when he tipped the balance on the seven-member court against a series of absurd attempts to short-circuit the judicial process by lawyers for President Trump’s campaign.As part of a national effort to reverse the will of the people who elected Democrat Joe Biden as president, the Trump campaign is attempting to use the courts to disenfranchise more than 220,000 Wisconsin voters in a desperate attempt to flip the state’s Electoral College votes to the defeated Republican. They had high hopes that the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where four of the seven members were elected with enthusiastic backing from Republican operatives, would acquiesce to their demands. But Hagedorn said “no.”The justice broke with Chief Justice Patience Roggensack and Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley — three members of the court who, like Hagedorn, received significant Republican support when campaigning for a place on the titularly nonpartisan bench — on several cases related to the 2020 presidential election.In those cases, Hagedorn chose to side with the court’s three progressive members — Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky — in rejecting the Trump team’s scheme to have the Supreme Court engage in a hyper-partisan rush to judgement.Hagedorn did not make his move quietly. He took the lead in rejecting arguments from Trump campaigns and from groups that seek to advance the president’s anti-democratic agenda. In blunt language, he identified those arguments as what they are: extreme and irresponsible."The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen,” Hagedorn wrote with regard to several lawsuits the court rejected last week. "While the rough and tumble world of electoral politics may be the prism through which many view this litigation, it cannot be so for us. In these hallowed halls, the law must rule."Hagedorn’s determination to put the rule of law ahead of partisanship earned him criticism from right-wing talk radio hosts who have embraced Trump’s fever dreams about widespread “voter fraud” and “errors” by Wisconsin election officials. They’re angry that Hagedorn has developed a pattern of refusing to serve as a rubber stamp for their partisan agendas.Amid all the finger pointing and blame laying, casual observers of Wisconsin’s turbulent judicial branch might imagine that Hagedorn is repositioning himself as a “moderate” member of the high court. But that’s not an accurate read of what’s happening.Hagedorn is what he has always been: a conservative. A former assistant attorney general under Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen who went on to serve as chief legal counsel Republican Gov. Scott Walker, he helped to draft Walker’s loathsome 2011 “budget repair bill” and was later appointed by Walker to a Wisconsin Court of Appeals judgeship. He’s been active with the right-wing Federalist Society and he’s got a record of taking socially conservative positions with which this newspaper strongly disagrees.Hagedorn was elected to the Supreme Court in 2019 without the support of this newspaper, and we continue to have our differences with him on many matters of law and policy.Yet, Hagedorn has, since joining the seven-member court last year, chosen to serve as a serious and independent-minded jurist who considers cases based on the facts, and on the merits of the arguments made in the legal briefs presented to the justices. The justice has shown his independence not merely on several cases involving election disputes and voting rights, but also on an early case involving efforts by Republican legislators to upend the efforts of Gov. Tony Evers to prevent the spread of COVID-19.In so doing, Hagedorn has refused to bend to the dictates of President Donald Trump, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, and Republican operatives who have over much of the past decade imagined the Supreme Court as a tool for the advancement of their personal and political agendas.Hagedorn’s seriousness and independence doesn’t make him any less conservative. What it does is distinguish the justice from the so-called “conservatives” on the high court.Roggensack, Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley are not conservatives. They are political hacks who want to make the Supreme Court into a third branch of the Republican-controlled state Legislature. They claim to be “constitutional conservatives,” but they are nothing of the sort. They are judicial activists who seek to legislate from the bench. And, worst of all, they seek to do so not on the basis of ideology, but simply to serve the partisan purposes of Trump, Vos and other other grifters who have made the Republican Party a tool for advancing their personal ambitions.Brian Hagedorn is not a hack. He’s an honest and honorable jurist. That does not mean that we will always agree with him. We know, as we are sure the justice does, that it is possible to be honest and honorable and still wrong. What it does mean is that we respect Brian Hagedorn’s independence and integrity — and his sincere efforts in recent days to defend both the rule of law and the right of Wisconsin voters to cast their ballots and to have those ballots counted.Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to . Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. 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You have permission to edit this article.Politicians and pundits show their ignorance when they refer to the Wisconsin Supreme Court as having “a conservative majority.” What the court has is an even divide between three progressive jurists who respect their oaths to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state of Wisconsin, and three partisan judicial activists who can casually disregard the rule of law if it might benefit their Republican allies and corporate paymasters.The only actual conservative on the court is Justice Brian Hagedorn, who made national headlines last...

Editorial: Justice Hagedorn is the only actual conservative on the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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